Thursday, January 30, 2014

CFP: "Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas"

On May 15-16-17 2014, LUCAS (the Leiden University Centre for the
Arts in Society) will host a three-day conference on the various ways
in which literary and artistic texts have represented, interrogated or
challenged juridical notions of ‘personhood’. The guiding assumption
behind our conference is that ‘personhood’ is not a (biologically)
given, stable property of human beings (which precedes their interaction
with the law), but that ‘personhood’ is assigned to selected (and
historically varying) ‘bodies’ by discursive regimes, such as those of
law, medicine, politics, religion, and education. During the conference
we will study how literature, art and culture form domains in which the
implications and scope of legal, political or medical conceptualizations
of personhood can be dramatized and thought through, and in which
alternative understandings of personhood can be proposed and
disseminated.

The symposium broaches the question of personhood on three
different levels: those of the body, the individual and the community.
Questions to be addressed include (but are not limited to), firstly:
From which discourses did notions of bodily integrity historically
emerge? Which social, political and medical developments are currently
challenging these notions? How do artistic, cultural and socio-political
phenomena (such as bio-art, body horror, the right-to-die movement,
etc.) invite us to rethink our notion of the human body? Second, what
literary and rhetorical figures made it possible to think of legal
personhood in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern era? What is the
legal status of ‘not-quite persons,’ such as children, illegal
immigrants, the mentally disabled, the unborn and the undead? What could
‘animal personhood’ entail? Finally: how do collective bodies acquire
personhood? How did art and literature represent legal entities such as
the medieval city, the seventeenth century trade company or the
nineteenth century corporation? Or what is the legally defined status of
sects, networks, conspiracies, and resistance movements?

400-word proposals for 20-minute papers can be send to
Frans-Willem Korsten, Nanne Timmer and Yasco Horsman (LUCAS, Leiden) at
legalbodies@hum.leidenuniv.nl.